Living in the woods, we don’t see Mercury very often. It’s always close to the sun, and so it only appears sometimes in morning or evening twilight and never gets high enough in the sky to clear the firs around the house. So in general you have to… Read More

Strange dark shapes were scuttling around on the sandy bottom. I watched them from the wharf at Chebeague Island with my little 8-year-old hands gripping the splintery planking and my face stuck out over the edge, looking down into the water. They glided around in gangs. Read More

The news from Mars recently has been as delightfully confusing as ever. It’s not that science is failing to advance – the astronomers are accumulating data hand over fist. But there’s so much knowledge pouring in that it’s hard to understand. How that’s any different… Read More

By the end of October in these parts, the long decline toward winter has ceased being an autumn flourish and started to look inevitable. The world is literally dying. The fields that turned from May green to midsummer rust and then to hay are now… Read More

“What’s this?” my wife said. She held up a shiny, speckled red ball about the size of an acorn. Me being the amateur naturalist and science fictionist in the house, and everybody else being merely curious, she expected I’d have an answer, or at least… Read More

After a while you get the feeling the solar system is a pretty strange place. Not only from looking at otherworldly pictures of moons and planets sent from spacecraft, but also because scientists say so. At least a half-dozen objects, probably more, have been described… Read More

Asters start appearing everywhere in August hereabouts and go well into fall. The biggest and brightest are the sunflowers, leaning east to west from morning to night and soaking up sunlight with big yellow-gold wheels that look for all the world like stars, which is… Read More

One night last February, I was already in bed and about to fall asleep when I looked at the clock. It was just after 10:30. At 10:40, I suddenly remembered, the totality of a total eclipse of the moon was due. I have to go,… Read More

It’s midsummer again and it’s not going to last any longer than it did before. But while it’s here it’s as real as a living being, and its emblems are the flowers, which grow practically everywhere from roadside to woods. Since mid-June the mouse-ear hawkweed… Read More

A great blue heron with crooked neck and slow-motion wingbeat cruised across the Unity park late this afternoon. Martins nesting in the bird condos by the baseball field darted around like point-winged aerobats and poked their gatherings into the holes where little heads were peering out. One thought… Read More

Before telescopes were invented in the early 1600s, most of what we now know exists in outer space was completely unimagined and largely unimaginable by ordinary human beings (like us). Galileo observed bizarre and shocking things – spots on the sun, planetlings orbiting Jupiter, countless stars never seen… Read More

The whippoorwills used to drive me mad at night. Or lull me to sleep. I can’t remember anything in between, it was so long ago. In bed I heard them repeat their name over and over in the dark, relentlessly, one phrase: Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Read More

Saturn’s moon Titan is big enough to see in a small telescope. It’s a tiny fleck of light that seems to be swinging on an invisible thread in the blackness, surprisingly distant from lustrous Saturn. It’s a picture that can burn like an afterimage into the screen of… Read More

One of the unfortunate casualties of the strife between us and the woods is the bluets. In May every year they blossom in pools and sprays among the dog violets and grass. They’re never unsightly, like the unkempt hatcheted dandelion leaves that can make junkyards… Read More

At our house, cats have responsibilities. Some of them seem to know it and some don’t. “Brian,” we say several times a day to the big fluffy orange specimen of Felis catus who’s named after an alcoholic cartoon dog, “you can’t just sleep on the… Read More

You can’t see infinity. Somehow you know it exists, though. This weird fact was pointed out by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1584, and 16 years later he was burned at the stake for saying so. Or, it was one thing he said that… Read More

If you look with a certain kind of eye at the photos of Jupiter’s moon Io taken by the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini spacecrafts, you cringe. It is a seething wasteland. Sulfurous, flaky yellow sands stretch across distances cracked by miles-wide gouges. Ten-thousand-foot mountains jut… Read More

One summer night, a tremendous commotion in the driveway split the darkness. There was a chaotic scrabbling sound, and then one of the cats screamed. The younger one, we thought from the voice. As we made our way to the window to look out, a… Read More

You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, googletag.cmd.push(function () { // Define Slot var slot_sizes = [[300,250]]; var new_slot_sizes = []; var has_banner = false; for (var i = 0; i < slot_sizes.length;… Read More

When Galileo first laid eyes on Jupiter’s four largest moons in 1610, he did not know what he was seeing. He had built a telescope for himself that was blurrier and less powerful than the $30 binoculars you can buy at Kmart. He already suspected… Read More

One cold December night, I woke up to a rumbling. I swore about noisy plow trucks and rolled over. But the rumbling went on way longer than it takes to block off the driveway. Man, this is a loud snowplow, I grumbled. The bedroom walls… Read More

Long ago the star Algol in Perseus was regarded as deeply ill-omened. Its name means “the ghoul,” after the Arabic, al-Ra’s al-Ghul, the Head of the Ghoul. Why the ancient astronomers thought it was evil is anybody’s guess. Ancient Hebrews called it Rosh ha Satan,… Read More

I remember looking up one night through broken clouds, with icy snow underfoot, and feeling afraid. The kind of fear that creeps along the back of your neck and clogs your throat. I was looking at a star, one pin of light among thousands, unimaginably… Read More

At first we thought they were aliens. Long spindly legs. An abdomen like a squared-off arrowhead. A sticklike head out of a science fiction movie. They lumbered lonely along countertops then fluttered away in drunken V-trajectories sounding like toy outboard motors. googletag.cmd.push(function () { //… Read More

Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing his leg up over the Dixmont mountains he strides into the evening sky, and by about 11 p.m. in winter you can see his dog behind him with legs outstretched and a large bright star in its shoulder. Sirius,… Read More

Every year we wonder if we’ll have a white Christmas, and every year we do. At least, that’s my recollection. In early December the ground freezes, usually, or it always used to. The grass becomes a carpet of brown spikes, and sleet or slushy snow… Read More

In a black sky, clear of city lights, your eye can pick out about 6,000 stars. About 300 of the brighter ones have names, such as Polaris, Sirius and Vega. The rest are known to astronomers by numbers. The names by and large are ancient,… Read More

The Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting around Saturn for about two years, sending back strange pictures. There are weird pictures of Saturn’s rings, pictures of Saturn back-lit by the sun. Strange images of some kind of jets streaming from its moon Enceladus. Pictures came back of Saturn’s largest… Read More

I have a theory. Actually I have a lot of theories, as my family and colleagues will nervously tell you. But this theory, I think, is more closely tuned to planet Earth than others. My theory is this: Most people are nowhere near as interested… Read More

There must be life out there somewhere. At least, people have always hoped so. To a medieval Christian, the stars were almost literally heaven itself, where life is eternal. Then in the 1610s, Galileo turned a telescope on the sky, and the hope for life… Read More

It’s the time of painted leaves again. There are better years and worse years for color, but the red maple beside my driveway never misses. It’s always one of the first to show fires, just as it’s first to bud in spring, and every fall it blazes even… Read More

In the fall of 1996 I remember thinking: How did it get to be the late ’90s suddenly? I was in Bulgaria, of all places, and had been since two summers past. In 1996, the year 2006 seemed like an ice-age away, though I had… Read More

The oldest living being on Earth is thought to be a bristlecone pine tree in California’s White Mountains. This tree, “Methuselah,” is about 4,750 years old, which means it had been alive for more than 2,700 years when Christ was walking to Jerusalem. Sequoias 3,000… Read More

Even though I anticipate it all year, late summer always surprises me. You can see it coming by mid-July. Patches of meadow grass redden and brown. Goldenrod sends up the first ranks of its empire. Dusty-pink steeplebush blossoms poke from bushes, and purple loosestrife and… Read More

Here’s another way of thinking about the size of the natural world. Imagine you’re a slug. For some people, this will not be too difficult. All you do is crawl along surfaces. On rotting planks. On gravel. Sometimes you perceive light, sometimes dark. Sometimes the… Read More

We do not understand much about virtue, as Socrates often observed. But one thing we know for sure is that size has nothing to do with toughness. Take the ruby-throated hummingbird, for example, which could be hovering by your flowers like a fine-tuned helicopter right… Read More

When you wish to get away from it all, you probably should be careful where you wish to get. Far away, the sentiment usually is. But “far away” is a doubtful phrase. Does it mean: “Away from the crowds”? Or: “Anyplace but here”? Or even:… Read More

Years ago when I taught at Unity College, the outdoor recreation professors drilled a sentence into every generation of students: “The woods don’t care.” It meant that along with being remarkably beautiful, the forest is remarkably dangerous. The oaks and cathedral-like firs do no more… Read More

The naturalists of ancient times thought the universe was made of spheres. Aristotle, Eudoxus and other Earth-bound explorers observed that the stars revolve together slowly once a year. The planets, or “wanderers,” moved among the fixed stars. googletag.cmd.push(function () { // Define Slot var slot_sizes… Read More

All summer long I pretend I’m in charge of my lawn. “Lawn” is a euphemism for the cleared area around my house where I try to stop birch and spruce saplings, meadowsweet, milkweed and goldenrod from engulfing everything. And where I succeed, that’s where grass grows. At least,… Read More

Maybe it’s all a state of mind, I don’t know, but every spring as the sun gets higher and the air gets warmer, everybody seems to blossom into a better mood. Boys race their car engines, and girls encourage them by peeling off as many clothes as they… Read More

In spring comes bird song again. Well, really, all winter the blue jays never stopped scolding and the chickadees never stopped saying their own names. But the whistle and chatter get full in the woods again, since the robins are poking around in the grass and the geese… Read More

So you’ve signed up for a course in astronomy. Conscious of your responsibilities as a student, and sort of interested in the sky, you read the syllabus. Under Day 4, you spot the phrase “The Life Cycle of Stars.” The “life” cycle? Are stars alive?… Read More

For most people, the night sky at a glance seems like a chaos of random lights. But as everyone who looks up there for long realizes, a lot more is happening than meets the eye. Even at first a few constellations are hard to miss. Read More

At any given moment on any given evening, the stars and planets seem motionless up there. If you watch for a little while, they all together shift position westerly because the Earth is rotating, but none of them seems to move independently of the others. Read More

Some things in nature are bigger than hen scratchings like this can describe. Take the number “1 billion,” for example. Politicians talk about billions of dollars, astronomers talk about billions of stars. But how much is a billion, really? googletag.cmd.push(function () { // Define Slot… Read More

The older you get, the more the cold takes the starch out of you. Every winter you have to work a little harder to get your mind right to survive. Not only do you have to break out the sweaters and boots, but you have to revise your… Read More

One December afternoon, before he outgrew every shoe in the house, my son and I went to the woods to cut a Christmas tree. He was old enough by then to navigate the snow the same way I did when I was a boy hunting blue spruces, which… Read More

Just before a recent snow fell, I stopped along the walk I take most mornings and saw four ducks paddling around on the beaver pond. The pond was slate-gray and flat, in that hunter’s stillness November balances on. The air is chilled, but not yet… Read More

The bright, ginger-colored star in the evening sky in recent weeks is not a star at all – it’s Mars. We’re humming past it roughly 43 million miles away, in one of the close encounters that occur every 2 1/4 years. A closer approach of… Read More

The blue jays always seem to be going somewhere. But where that is, no one knows, exactly. They swoop in from nowhere in squalls of five or 10 or more and take up positions like commandos in the fir trees, shouting warnings and orders the… Read More

For thousands of years Polaris, the cold bright star at the end of the Little Dipper’s handle, has sat at a point in the sky just about due north. You can see it every cloud-free night. If you were to set up a lawn chair… Read More

This is not paranoia. I’m definitely being watched. Sitting on my doorstep with coffee and binoculars this sunny October morning, my mission is to see what the blue jays are shouting about. But something’s behind me. It’s like the feeling you get in a crowded… Read More

The red maple outside my bathroom window has been there a long time. It’s probably 70 feet tall now, and mutely overlooks the birches, poplars, oaks and hemlocks around it. This maple is always first to bud in spring and first to turn in fall. Read More

Prehistoric monsters are flying around your backyard. They’re probably out there this very afternoon, terrorizing your airspace. They have ferocious teeth. They’re at the top of the food chain, they’re hungry, and they’re everywhere. Luckily, they do not eat humans. Also, they are only an… Read More

Now that the dandelions are over their adolescent outburst, an amazing thing is happening in the fields and roadsides in Maine. Midsummer has arrived, like a hiker cresting a steep hill and pausing to take in the view. Wildflowers and grasses of subtle but extraordinarily rich colors have… Read More